THE PORT-WINE STAIN, third in Norman Lock's American Novels cycle

THE PORT-WINE STAIN
NORMAN LOCK (The American Novels series #3)
Bellevue Literary Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In his third book of The American Novels series, Norman Lock recounts the story of a young Philadelphian, Edward Fenzil, who, in the winter of 1844, falls under the sway of two luminaries of the nineteenth-century grotesque imagination: Thomas Dent Mütter, a surgeon and collector of medical “curiosities,” and Edgar Allan Poe. As Fenzil struggles against the powerful wills that would usurp his identity, including that of his own malevolent doppelgänger, he loses his mind and his story to another.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED ME WITH A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: I’ve read other reviews in the book-blogosphere that were, shall we say, indicative of a certain disappointment in the blogger’s experience reading The Port-Wine Stain. I am not among these bloggers. I liked the book. In fact, I liked it the best of The American Novels cycle that Bellevue Literary Press will be publishing through 2018. I asked their publicist for all of them published so far, since I was that curious about Lock’s aims. When they arrived (thanks again!), I started from book 1, The Boy in His Winter, which wasn’t a favorite of mine; American Meteor, second in the cycle, which definitely was a favorite of mine; so now, by book three, I think I might have absorbed a sense of purpose and a trust in Lock’s craftsmanship and artistry that others might not have the advantage of possessing.

Or maybe I just have really good taste. This book was shivery-good.

He knocked absurdly on the skull like a man impatient for a door to open. His eyes glazed over. He appeared to be in the grasp of something beyond the reach of ordinary mortals.
“Time is slowing,” he said in a leaden voice. “Each moment grows and fattens like a drop of rain on a window sash, waiting to fall.”

That’s Poe upon visiting our invented narrator, Mr. Edward Fenzil, aged nineteen and of ignoble stock, who has been gifted with a leg-up in the world by becoming bone-keeper in Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter’s medical school. Does it feel over-the-top to you? Then forevermore don’t read Poe himself! As Edward dusts skulls, Dr. Mütter gives him what amount to private lectures. It was required that he clean the operating theater after surgeries, but he was also always within reach of the great man, could pose questions, and assist the doctor with his researches on different scientific subjects.

Dr. Mütter also encourages a closeness between Edward and Edgar, saying the friendship will benefit Edward by allowing him to observe closely the workings of “the pathological mind.” But in any meddling mentor’s files there are innumerable cases like this, where the intent and the result are at opposite poles. Edgar is a man of the world, a gentleman, and overawes young Edward. It wouldn’t have been difficult, considering Edward’s youth and (in the time period) it wouldn’t be any surprise for a lower-class lad to be unfamiliar with any gentility or mannerliness.

Poe’s proffered friendship has a profound impact on Edward in so many ways. As Edgar introduces Edward to every strange corner of the city of Philadelphia, he (deliberately?) changes the young man forever:

While I knew him, he made me see—Poe did; made me understand that, unlike a bodily organ, the soul desires, even wills, its own continuance. It can be said to be the seat of will and desire and, even in its necrotic state, the root of evil. ... A Sunday school lesson or one of Cotton Mather's gaudy rants that helped to kindle the Salem bonfires is nearer to the truth of it than a fable by Poe, Hawthorne, or Melville. Evil's a malignancy beyond the skill and scalpel of {doctors} to heal or extirpate.

I’m in sympathy with this view, and would be converted to it after learning one of Poe’s lessons for Edward. In order to become a member of Poe’s Thanatopsis Society, Edward is subjected to an appalling initiation ritual involving the young man proving he is worthy of ritual transformation into a death god. Needless to say, Edward is traumatized by the nature of the initiation. So was I when I read it. The tone of the novel becomes decidedly darker after this event, matching the mental agitation of the narrator telling his story some thirty-five years and the Civil War between him and it.

No, I’m not going to reveal the ritual. Suffice it to say that anyone familiar with Poe’s stories will recognize it and feel the same horrified, claustrophobic feelings they had when it they first encountered it. You’ll know when you get there. After the traumatized Edward runs out of the Thanatopsis Club, vowing never to return, he seeks comfort in a local whorehouse, only his second visit and experience of sex. He describes it to Moran in disturbing detail, offering details that would elicit a “TMI! TMI!” from most people, myself included. But rely on Lock to stir you up, rile your easily offended inner maiden auntie:

Ravished is a nice word found in sentimental novel. Between us, Moran, the word that stuck in my mind like shit to the bottom of a shoe was fucked.

And there it is. Why I have come to enjoy so much reading Norman Lock’s writing. It is never all one thing, one note, one temperament of that note. I value this highly because I see so many earnestly presented stories chipped and chipped and finally cracked into a pile of who-cares-dust. Offend me, anger me, and I might or might not pick up another of your books; bore me and we’re done here, this conversation is over.

Meanwhile back in Philadelphia, Edgar realizes he has taken a step much too far by subjecting Edward to what he did. Edward has spent the intervening time vowing never, never, never, so as all the adults in the room know, Edward’s still infatuated with Poe and all he knows, does, and represents. Their make-up meeting, encouraged by Dr. Mütter himself which guarantees it will occur, seems to show Edward that Edgar is genuinely regretful:

“Forgive me,” Poe repeated earnestly.
I nodded coldly. I was not above acting like a child; I was hardly more than one.
“I want you to have this,” he said, fishing a gold watch and chain from his pocket. He took a step toward me. I stood my ground. He closed the distance between us, the timepiece in his hand. “It belonged to my father, David Poe—not John Allan, who fostered me but would not adopt me. My real father was David Poe, Jr., the actor. It's said that he abandoned my mother and me. It's a lie. He died--too young: He was only twenty-seven.”

I accepted his gift. It felt substantial in my hand. In spite of myself, I was pleased to have it.

The tone of this scene is so like that of a couple making up after a fight that I had to pause and remind myself that this isn’t an erotic relationship. It was a time when, however, male friendships were much more intensely conducted than today.

The darkest turn the friendship is ever to take comes not long after the earnest apology Edgar offers, and again at a meeting of the Thanatopsis Club. Edgar has been subtly preparing us, Edward included, for a genuine and unnerving crisis. Each of his acts before this has been explainable, but this one is simply and purely cruel, evil and cruel. The concept of the doppelgänger is a bit unnerving, to be sure: A person unrelated to yourself whose appearance, and sometimes behavior, is as close as possible without being identical twins. Placed in the hands of an unscrupulous man, knowledge of another person’s doppelgänger’s whereabouts can lead to nasty mischief. Edgar having found Edward’s doppelgänger in the form of a hanged murderer, whose likeness to Edward is marred only by a port-wine stain.

Here begins Edward’s descent from nervous wreck to madman. Edgar and everyone around him will not let Edward’s fearful brain slow down for so much as a moment, playing tricks and (in Poe’s case) writing a story about an unfortunate young man named Edward who fancies he has a port-wine stain, which spreads and spreads, and...the story is incomplete. He steals the story in a fit of rage, and bewails ever having laid eyes upon Edgar Allan Poe. Edward’s unbalanced state sinks further as Edgar shows his genuine lack of human kindness by treating Edward’s fears of the port-wine stain merely as evidence of his theft and guilt.

It is a profoundly painful ending for the book, resolving Edward’s story as confinement to the best possible care in a madhouse paid for by Dr. Mütter; released after six months, returning to his former position; his medical degree paid for, as a gift, by the Good Doctor; service as a field surgeon in the Civil War; finally, after a long life, tending the needs of a few established patients such as Walt Whitman, whose impression upon Stephen Moran in American Meteor was so very intense and is the link between Dr. Edward Fenzil and his audience Moran that is at the heart of Lock’s choice of narrative style.

Dr. Fenzil thanks Moran for listening to him ramble, and for ignoring his disfigurement by the port-wine stain he carries as a reminder of a toxic friendship of long ago.

AMERICAN METEOR by Norman Lock, 4 stars for Manifest Destiny taking one in the chops

AMERICAN METEOR: A Novel
NORMAN LOCK
Bellevue Literary Press
$15.95 trade paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this panoramic tale of Manifest Destiny, Stephen Moran comes of age with the young country that he crosses on the Union Pacific, just as the railroad unites the continent. Propelled westward from his Brooklyn neighborhood and the killing fields of the Civil War to the Battle of Little Big Horn, he befriends Walt Whitman, receives a medal from General Grant, becomes a bugler on President Lincoln’s funeral train, goes to work for railroad mogul Thomas Durant, apprentices with frontier photographer William Henry Jackson, and stalks General George Custer. When he comes face-to-face with Crazy Horse, his life will be spared but his dreams haunted for the rest of his days.

By turns elegiac and comic, American Meteor is a novel of adventure, ideas, and mourning: a unique vision of America’s fabulous and murderous history.

My Review: At some point in this brief, pithy book, I caught myself wondering why I was turning pages so fast, why I couldn’t wait to find the next golden moment described in lovely, burnished prose, when I knew how the story ended already. It’s not a mystery, it’s not a puzzle novel, it’s a meditation on the Manifest Destiny era. The myth of the poor lad who comes from nothing and nowhere to make a fortune is an oft-told tale. Lock’s spin on that is to have the traditional humble lad, this on named Stephen Moran, as protagonist:

While my father was out boozing, she'd read to me by the stub of a candle, a thread of soot twisting upwards from its pinched, meager flame. By her voice alone, she could raise up the old stories from the bones of their words and--lilting between shades of comedy and melodrama--turn the dreary space around me into a stage for my wildest imaginings.

And while she’s creating the world anew for her son, she’s also priming the pump for his life-long belief that there is fate even if there isn’t a god to be found, since all the old fairy tales involve come-uppances and just deserts.

Growing up in antebellum Brooklyn, harvesting oysters to sell for his own food, and working all the hours it’s possible to work leaves the narrator with a clear-sighted picture of his future. His childhood, if you can stretch a point and call it that, ended with mother’s death. Hard work, little pay, no future:

I had sucked on the tit of disillusionment and teethed on the bitter root of cynicism. I was on the way to the misanthropy that would sour me.

Intervention in this soul-killing, life-shortening grind is the cataclysm of the Civil War. Young Stephen Moran takes an escape route from worthless labor and attaches himself (at thirteen, he can’t really be said to join) to the Army. He becomes a bugler and loses an eye, but these events aren’t dwelt upon. Moran is more interested in analyzing “the sickness of the degenerate age in which I lie at night, listening to the boasts and grievances of the dead” for his audience, interested in the powerful figures of the age for their benign or malign impact on creating the age he’s lived though.

Looking back, reminiscing, nostalgically reliving moments of pleasure, momentous and public or quiet and quotidian, isn’t in Moran’s nature. He is leaching the poison of a life into his listener’s ears. He has seen but never made a difference to events that form the national mythology:

Even now, when I have time to consider what I've been and what I am, I doubt I comprehend my humanity, if I can claim so grand a word for my own morsel of life. I might as well be a meteor of a man, for all the difference I've made on earth.

The perspective of the aging on the course of life isn’t always so searingly honest, but it serves the narrative needs of the story for it to be so. I hope for all our sakes that such unflinching clarity becomes pandemic in our own degenerate, I’d even say diseased, age.

Back to the Civil War...Moran’s lost eye lands him in the hospital, where he’s visited by a familiar figure from his life in Brooklyn and Manhattan, Walt Whitman. As Whitman pauses beside the bed of our sixteen-year-old hero, they share a moment that will stay with Moran his whole subsequent life:

‘How old are you, son?' Whitman asked.
'Going on seventeen.'
'So young,' he said, stroking the back of my hand with his poem-stained fingers. 'How did you come to lose your eye?'
I told him the story of my heroism, with embellishments--told it so well, I was nearly persuaded of my exceptional character.
'You sacrificed what little you had to call your own for democracy, freedom, and human dignity. You gave an eye, half of man's greatest blessing, when rich men up north paid a small price to keep themselves and their sons from harm.'
With those few words, accompanied by a glance that seemed to measure the dimensions of my meager existence, Whitman made me see myself as a sacrifice on the altar of wealth, but a hero notwithstanding.

Receiving such a benediction from the “poem-stained fingers” (isn’t that a lovely phrase?) of America’s most revered poet? Oh my! And the effect of Moran’s story on Whitman leads to a momentous change in the fortunes of a no-longer-needed bugler from an ended war. Whitman remembers Moran, and mentions the tale of his heroism to General Grant. Grant summons the lad, gives him a Medal of Honor for sacrificing his eye, and gives him one of the signal honors available to any American soldier at the time: he is to be the bugler playing “Taps” at each stop of Lincoln’s funeral train as it wends its way from Washington to Springfield, Illinois, for the assassinated president’s ceremonial burial.
Moran has plenty of time to accustom himself to the smell of death, from battlefields to the decomposing president. He sleeps in the funeral car, an ostentatious gift from the railroad interests to the living president for his use in meeting with his generals in the field. (Lincoln scorned it, never used it, while alive.) It is usual to meditate on the dead princes of our world, and Moran is no exception:

What is a good man if not one who does not believe in himself to the exclusion of others? ... He was asked to bear what cannot be borne--what should not be borne. I hope never to be so tested, for I have it on the best authority that I will not bear it.

No ordinary person can bear the extreme pressure of the Presidency; Lincoln bore it in time of civil war. Moran is far from alone in his realization that his ordinariness is also an advantage. His life after the brief flash of fame will go on, unlike Lincoln’s. He will go on, traveling and meeting remarkable men, running from all women, all of which confirms his core belief:

For all my wanderings, I'm ordinary. I came to terms long ago with my littleness. A man is what he is--he can't rise so much as an inch above his shortcomings--Horatio Alger be damned!

It doesn’t matter that one rubs shoulders with the world’s history-makers, alive or dead. You are what you are, and that’s all there is to it. Heresy to think, still less speak aloud, in that time of Manifest Destiny’s ascendency. Moran rides in the Lincoln Parlor car as a steward to the paladins of the day. He watches the slaughter of buffalo in their millions. He sees mile-long swaths of prairie grass torched to amuse the grandees.
As horrible as he thinks all of that is, it brings Moran his life’s purpose: He becomes a photographer as the largesse of his railroad tycoon employer. He documents the progress of the railroad through the Indian country his government swore would be theirs in perpetuity. His mentor, famous wilderness photographer William Henry Jackson, makes photographs for the railroad tycoon as a means of financing the his true passion: recording the end of the people called the Ute, starved, shot, and left for disease to finish off. Jackson chose Moran as his assistant when Moran was learning basic photography from Jackson’s portrait-taking brother in Omaha. Jackson scorned this as much as he scorned the documentary whitewash he splashed on the railroad, an attitude that well suited Moran. It was Moran’s gift to watch genius work:

What was not possessed of the 'fat light'--an immanence that shed radiance over the world of gross matter--should be left to the portraitists of sausage-shaped ladies and their rich consorts.

It was also Moran’s fate to travel, in the teeth of the oncoming winter, with Jackson to photograph the Ute in their last days. As reluctant as Moran was, it provided him with the agreeable experience of first love with a Ute girl. What makes his experience endurable, though, and allows him to cling to the edge of life:

The negatives he did manage were made in the hour or two when the sun seemed to rally with a yellowy light reminiscent of an egg yolk; usually, it looked pale as a pearl on the steely blue or leaden sky above the snow-scrubbed lake. That's a purple passage fit for a novel but hardly descriptive of the actuality of that winter, which was almost past enduring.

Jackson’s art, his astonishing eye and precise technique, set a bar that Moran knows he can never reach, still less surpass. He is, however, urged on by the brush with greatness.

As Jackson heads off deeper into the wilderness, Moran heads to Fort Abraham Lincoln, there to attach himself to General George Armstrong Custer as personal photographer. He is mesmerized by the aura of Manifest Destiny shining from Custer’s brilliant golden locks. As he observes Custer more and more, and from an intimate viewpoint, Moran comes to loathe the man, as he already loathed the philosophy that he embodies:

At his request--a Custer request was a command impossible to refuse--I produced a series of prints for the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia: the general with Bloody Knife, his favorite Indian scout; with the Custers' pack of eighty dogs; with his junior officers, planning the destruction of the Lakota Sioux; with Libbie in the parlor of their quarters at the fort; and the general striking a pose that would become as recognizable as Napoléon's; arms folded across his chest, looking forward and slightly upward at his magnificent destiny.

The repugnance of the images makes my skin crawl. Lock’s clarity and transparency of prose has a way of allowing the underlying emotional state to reach me before I’m aware that what I’m reading is horrible, vicious, evil, full of the darkest smoke from hellfire. Moran, in whose mouth these utterances are placed, is himself invisible. He feels, as he’s said, his own smallness, and this is what makes him the perfect mouthpiece for Lock’s excoriation of our founding Western myths.

Moran makes his most life-changing decision while preparing to photograph the slaughter at Little Big Horn. In the run-up to this national tragedy Moran determines that it will be he who kills Custer, he who will stop this particular monster from causing more horrendous suffering, win or lose. The hubris of which Custer was guilty in his pursuit of the battle made Moran’s task, oddly, more difficult, as it led directly to the almost immediate destruction of his forces. Yet Moran manages to carry his self-imposed duty to its end: He shoots Custer in the temple, destroying the seat of his evil thoughts.

And at this moment, Moran (the only white survivor of the massacre) has the single most important meeting and takes the single most important photograph of his life. A figure bends over him, he thinks to finish him off. Instead Moran will lose the autonomy of his soul.

It is Crazy Horse who seeks Moran out. Crazy Horse, the seer whose prophecies began this branch of the war that will end at Wounded Knee, in bitterest defeat for the Native Americans. Crazy Horse gives Moran the “gift” of prophecy. Moran, in his turn, gives Crazy Horse the Medal of Honor he has come to despise. Prophecy is a gift that Crazy Horse gives him by the simple expedient of living on after his body dies in Moran’s mind. Crazy Horse as an intimate roommate? Sounds horrible, knowing the future and seeing its inevitability as Fate unfolds before your eyes:

A sour view of things, I grant you; but one borne out by the history of our age and of the age to come, when Trinity--not the Christians' but Oppenheimer's--will turn Alamogordo sand to glass. In the future, dead cities will molder behind rusting thorns no prince can ever penetrate; dirty bombs will engender tribes of lepers--not by germs, but by deadly atoms; and radioactive isotopes will be left to cool for an age or more, sealed in burial chambers with a pharaoh's curse.

As the reader shudders with the sense of doom, Moran’s listener is finally revealed to be his own doctor house-calling on him at the end of his life. All the years of his small life after the last brush with Manifest Destiny, Moran has never so much as whispered of his extraordinary dual nature and his fellow passenger.
He also tells the doctor that he has the only image of Crazy Horse on earth. His camera had fallen with him during battle and, against all odds, the glass plate did not break and the lens exposed Crazy Horse’s image. The doctor asks why wouldn’t you sell such an incredibly valuable image, the price would be astronomical. Sell?

Crazy Horse said, ‘Remember this moment well.’
‘I will,’ I said solemnly…
‘I’m going to spare your life so that you’ll never be free of me.’

THE BOY IN HIS WINTER: An American Novel by Norman Lock

THE BOY IN HIS WINTER: An American Novel
Norman Lock
Bellevue Literary Press
$14.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

Repurposing great works of literature, famous characters from same, and/or dead authors in modern ways and to modern ends is almost overdone as a phenomenon. Really, writers. Stop it.

I said "almost overdone" because, if I know publishing at all, they will collectively ride this hobby-horse's hooves entirely off. There are a few of these cultural appropriations that are enjoyable, of course, it's statistically impossible that such a gigantic amount of work won't produce a shining light now and then. I think of Catherynne Valente's Russian fairy-tale reinterpretation of Baba Yaga in Deathless and grin all over my face. So the tap will continue to drip even after the shower's over. It ain't over yet, though.

It's in that silver river-shine light that I approached The Boy in His Winter. Is this another misappropriation or maladaptation of a novel that's been entwined into the USA's sense of itself? Happily, no...but.

I love author Lock's prose (my copy of the book has 10 Book Darts marking especially lovely passages or especially telling insights). It slides easy, inviting toes to dangle or shoulders to float, gently rocking.

To ennoble is to diminish by robbing people of their complexity, their completeness, of their humanity, which is always clouded by what gets stirred up at the bottom.

That these complex and honeyed words are put in crude, ill-bred Huck Finn's mouth works because we're told from the get-go that he's an old man now and telling his story to an unnamed, depersonalized amanuensis. And I wonder, since the novel's frame is 2077, if that amanuensis isn't some form of AI, which might also account for the fact that Huck (now called Albert, or Al, since rejoining normal time after Katrina) always addresses the unseen being as if responding to questions. Much like a good writer's-amanuensis software would program it to do: "Comes complete with wandering-thought alert and long-silence breaker!"

That I'm conjecturing this, since I wasn't told or shown it in any way, is a source of my itchy lack of satisfaction with the book as a whole. Huck and Jim get on their stolen raft in 1835 and float, magically out of time's reach, until certain points in history, national and personal. I can go there. I can love the trip. My disbelief is suspended from the moment I open this kind of book. But when all the author does with my suspended disbelief is take advantage of it so as not to have to work at explaining his authorial choices...well, pop goes the weasel and here I am with my teeth in my mouth wondering what I was thinking when I started this sentence:

The raft was seized, with a noise like needles knitting, and we were hemmed in for winter -- river and the old channel's oxbow lake having frozen solid. By now, we guessed we were not two ordinary river travelers...it must have been the river that was extraordinary: a marvel that protected us by the same mysterious action that had given a common horse wings and changed a woman into a laurel tree.

I read the author's mind (always a dangerous act) to hear, "I'll make a classical allusion to magical transformations and maybe they'll glide on by the Hows and gaze lovingly at the Whys." Now, don't mistake me, I'm not asking Lock to invent some hard-SF gobbledygook that doesn't belong in this book. What I'm left wanting is a Why that has the power to cause Huck to introspect all through the book, to meditate on the nature of his and Jim's unique experience and how it's made him who and what he is.

{Y}ou make do with what you're given, and I've spent a good many years learning to write fine-sounding sentences so that I can hide behind them. It's the way of the hermit crab, with nothing to recommend it but the pretty shell it annexes for its own.

Don't know about you, but I could use more of this beautiful revelation and on many more topics. Again, I stress that I don't want the book to be something it isn't, some Guide To Life or some kind of Aliens Messed With My Tachyon Bodyspace. I love the concept as it's written. But it isn't doing enough of what it does so well to merit the full five stars I begin by giving every book I am seduced into picking up.

Bellevue Literary Press is to be commended for publishing this life-intersecting-science story in such a beautiful, well-crafted package. Norman Lock is Norman Lock, and doesn't need the likes of me to praise his talent, demonstrated so amply so very often in a long career. (May 2014)

Yet I wanted more than I got of the sweetness he gave.

At The Small Press Book Review, my take on THE BOY IN HIS WINTER: An American Novel

Rating: 3.75* of five

New ‪‎review‬! THE BOY IN HIS WINTER: An American Novel Bellevue Literary Press sent me the book at my request.

Review posted at The Small Press Book Review by literary gatekeeper Mel Bosworth, arbiter of good taste and merit. Clearly he must be, because he publishes my reviews.

This is one of three loosely linked novels by Norman Lock and published by the amazing folks at Bellevue Literary Press. I'll be reviewing them all before publication day for the third one,THE PORT-WINE STAIN, due out in June.